On authenticating forwards

I was at a free concert given at the Boulder Public Library tonight. One thing I like about this area is that you can go to something like that and find very skilled professional classical music performers.

There were also readings. The Mayor of Boulder read an email forward that had been attributed to George Carlin. Now anyone who's heard or seen Carlin or a recording of him even once would have known that this was not George Carlin. The Mayor did not know. But he would have known, if he had checked. At least one telltale was that there wasn't a single swear word in it. (Link is to a PDF of F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).)

Email forwards are still more often false or misattributed than they are correct.

There was something else I was going to write about, something that I think even deserved to be written about, but I forgot about it during the concert.